


hold me closer, tiny dancer

by Waistcoat35



Series: lay me down in sheets of linen, you've had a busy day today [2]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Dancing, Genuinely the softest thing I've written in a while, God I nearly cried, M/M, Thomas Barrow Has Sleepy Bitch Disease, if not ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 00:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21006398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waistcoat35/pseuds/Waistcoat35
Summary: They finally get to the hotel rooms. Thomas has another nap.





	hold me closer, tiny dancer

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much a continuation of 'something lonesome about you, something wholesome about you', but you don't really have to read it for this to make sense. The first part is about the train journey they take to London, and this is kind of a continuation. However, I didn't feel it followed on closely enough to the first one to count as an extra chapter.

He can’t quite grasp the fact that this is happening, this soft and shivering thing growing bold and freestanding between them like a colt learning to stand up and run within hours of being born. There was a time when Thomas would be the one to reach out, to move first, to take the lead, but despite Baxter’s reassurances of his youth he knows that he is old and he is tired and he doesn’t know if he can make himself move first anymore, after everything, after being scared for so long. He has had rebuttal after rejection after repulsion, and when a hand is held out to him as music begins to waft out of the gramophone, he could almost fall off the sofa. Whether this is out of surprise or haste to accept, he doesn’t know and wouldn’t tell. 

He is pulled up not unlike a puppet on a string, previously flopped down and now come to life – the only difference is that he is being guided, not controlled, and it is a guidance he will gladly accept. The hand on his hip warms and gentles him, one of his own drifting to Richard’s elbow as they shift in place. He is just the slightest bit shorter than Richard, the first that’s happened out of anyone he’s fancied, and he finds that he rather enjoys the security of it, enjoys being able to gaze upward or into the soft lighting of the room past Richard’s shoulder as he pleases.

The tune is jazz, the tempo not crawling and yet not dizzying either, and they fall into a swaying, swinging, sauntering of a dance where they part and return and just barely avoid stepping on one another’s feet. Richard is always careful, always gentle, the hand not on his hip sliding to take the hand that is not on Richard’s elbow, and the nonchalant way the warm, slightly larger palm slips over his pale, half-gloved one definitely does _not _put a lump in his throat. He lets the hand stay there, curls his fingers gently, slightly, to show his acceptance as they do a small twirl. He isn’t sure what the dance is – isn’t sure that Richard knows either. But they’re enjoying it, drinking in the sight of one another and the feeling of hand over hand, so it’s okay.

After a while they tire of it – or at least Thomas does. He always gets like this when they first meet up after a while, starved of Richard’s presence and intoxicated with it so suddenly in such a short period of time, and it makes him so very pliant and trusting and – dare he say it – _soft_. He’s never met somebody who fills him with the urge to curl up and cuddle into them so much as Richard does, and as much as he is skittish and startling and so, so careful, the instinct creeps out without too much coaxing nowadays. They slow down and Richard sinks back down onto the sofa, shifting horizontally before pulling Thomas over by the arm, still only guiding, yet it feels like their arms are two magnets with the opposing ends facing. He swallows his carefulness and he swallows his pain, and after so many years he just lets himself _want_, lets himself _have _– he follows, and before he knows it he is half-snuggled into a soft-firm, shirt-covered shoulder that smells of something vaguely expensive and woody. He can’t entirely bring himself to care, because the scent could never be replicated anyway, not outside of this room, this time, this place, this _moment_. And also because he really _is _getting sleepy, now. He struggles to find a word to describe how it all feels in his overwhelmed contentment, until he doesn’t.

It’s _nice_. It feels nice to have dined and danced and laughed, to be cuddled up against someone who doesn’t mind cuddling – who, in fact, _wants to hold him_, who might actually even have feelings for him that are as strong as his own for them. He starts to say as much and instantly regrets being so open, but it doesn’t seem to matter because it turns out that all he had said was mumbled gibberish into Richard’s collarbone. If he hadn’t figured this out yet, he would’ve been informed by the soft chuckle that vibrates the chest under his head, the hand that sweeps a loose, tousled lock from his face and tucks it back up.

“Say again, love?”

It takes some doing, but he managed to force the words out – ignore the way he curls up a little bit tighter as he says it, ignore the way he withdraws slightly from his sprawled-out slouch, ignore it, _ignore _it – he doesn’t know if he’s telling himself or begging Richard.

“Just – ‘m just – ‘s just – just nice, is all. Happy. Happy to be here.” He nestles into Richard’s side, head tucked down and away, until he feels the gentlest tap of a single finger on the top of his head. He feels glued into place, but he manages to make himself twist his head back around, eyes still sweeping slowly up a collarbone, a few undone buttons, a graceful neck, admiring every feature to delay meeting the other man’s eyes. The hand has threaded through his hair and shifts soothingly, and that is perhaps what lets him make the final step in looking upwards. The eyes he meets are gorgeously greyish-blue, but rather than the dulled-flint shade of his own, the shade of sea at the bottom of a high cliff, he sees the shade of warm smoke. And they are _shining._

Above all, though, they are kind. And in a deep-down place inside of him, inside the tiny calcified ammonite he keeps the best of himself in, that is what he has always really wanted. In his youth he had chased after the Dukes, the Lords, the cruelly handsome and handsomely cruel, and despite all that - _God_, he just wishes that he had fallen in love with someone _kind. _

“What’s going on in that busy head?” He must start slightly at that, because the hand migrates down to rest carefully between his shoulder blades, to rub back and forth slightly. He tries his best not to sigh. He _does_.

“Sorry. Didn’ mean not to listen.” Those eyes meet his again, and they really are _kind_, and warm, a pool he wants to bathe in forever.

“You’re alright. I was just saying that – I’m glad.” He tilts his head upwards a bit more.

“Hm?” He earns another slight breath of a chuckle.

“I’m glad that you’re happy. That this can _make _you happy. That’s all I want for you. ‘s what you deserve.” He’s quite sure he reddens then, tucks everything from his nose down into the fabric, eyes still shyly gazing up, half-lidded.

“You mean that.” It isn’t a question.

“I really do.” It is an answer. A reassurance. The hand strokes from his forehead backwards, tousling his hair more than fixing it.

And with the flat warm around them and arms holding him like they’ve thought about letting go and decided it’s not in the agenda for a good few decades, Thomas Barrow decides to be brave.

Here comes the scramble, the stumbling climb, and he tries his very best not to puncture any vital organs with his sharp knees and angular elbows, but he can’t promise, not entirely, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. He’s now fully face to face with Richard, their noses not quite an inch apart as he stares intently, with a hint of heady desperation. He needs him to understand. If he doesn’t understand now, he might never be able to say it again. It’ll be tucked back into its shell, that miniscule, hardened thing, and he will curl up so tightly that he becomes a shell himself. That doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, he supposes, but he _is _very, very tired.

“There hasn’t been anyone else. Never anyone else who’s made me feel like you do. Like a fool but not, because you don’t make it feel like that’s a bad thing to be. Like – like I can have something, like I’ve _earned _something, without – without having to trade away everything else in me to buy it. ‘s the only way I can say it.” _And I’m scared, I’m bloody terrified_, he does not say, but he thinks he might be trembling now, the shivers seeping through the gaps in his ribcage and curling up there, and as warm as it is he feels too cold as well as too hot, his top half too unsteady and his bottom half numb, and when he feels like that all he wants is a blanket and for somebody to come and find him and tell him things will be okay.

Both arms wrap around him properly now, and they rub and hold and gently squeeze, the pressure just enough to feel remotely more grounded again. Richard leans forward, and their noses nearly touch.

“D’you know, I could say the very same about you.”

“Then say it,” he croaks, because he needs to hear it. Saying it is a commitment, and much like declarations of devotion and other such things, he’s only ever made them for _somebody else_s and has never had one made to him. He thinks it might be quite nice.

Richard says it all back to him. It does feel, as he had said, quite nice.

_Quite nice _enough that his eyes feel a little damp, and oh dear.

Something always scrunches up a bit awkwardly when he cries, and this time it is the crimped-paper crinkle between his eyes, above the bridge of his nose, that is smoothed away by a kiss as he ducks his face back downward, nestles his head underneath Richard’s chin and into the inviting juncture between shoulder and neck. He is not an ammonite, as he curls up there, but some small soft thing pried out of its shell, and though he shivers that feeling is gone, the too-hollow achy emptiness between his ribs, nestling across his sternum like trail of ivy, winding around his clavicle like a cool-scaled serpent. It is out, and he has said it, and he is cared for in the way he cares so, so _much_, and he finally thinks that feeling this strongly may in fact be worth it, just sometimes.

He is still very tired, and nice, sweet things are being murmured into the shell of his ear. He isn’t thinking about the cramps one gets from sleeping on a sofa, or the fact that he ought probably to take his tie off. He is thinking about the nice things, and about the coat from the back of the sofa that is being dragged down to rest on top of him, and about how it is being tucked around him tenderly, and about how he might have said _I love you _in there at some point, whimpered into the notch in the collarbone.

He is thinking about how Richard had said it back.


End file.
